The rapidly approaching GDPR deadline, i.e., May 25, 2018, is clearly on the horizon. GDPR is not just limited to the European Union. Even if you are not a European-based business, you will be affected if you have customers in the EU.

Contents 1. GDPR Compliance 2. Steps to make your Testing GDPR compliant 3. How can TestingXperts help?

GDPR affects all businesses within and outside of the EU who hold personal data for individuals within the EU. From IT operations to marketing, anyone dealing with personal data needs to recognise how GDPR affects their data workflows. GDPR applies to all the data that is gathered from the ecosystem, whether it is provided by customers or gathered by automated systems. This also includes personal data stored and used in big data analytics platforms.

GDPR Compliance

In many organisations, development teams deal with data from real production environments and usually, this data originates from customer databases. However, testing with real data often causes problems regarding information security and confidentiality. GDPR necessitates explicit attention to this practice. Every data that includes personal data is subject to GDPR compliance. It is illicit to have personal data anywhere where it is not-obligatory.

Therefore, Test Data Management(TDM) is an area that definitely needs attention from GDPR perspective. From bringing efficiency to data processing and testing the quality of deliverables, TDM is susceptible to vulnerabilities around organisational and regulatory standards. Therefore, various measures (e.g. masking) should be employed to ensure that the personal data is encrypted.

Test data may become a block in your preparations for GDPR. In order to address the challenges associated with testing and make the testing GDPR compliant, it is important to follow the below steps.

Steps to make your Testing GDPR compliant

1. Document the use of personal data in test environments.

Documenting the personal data should be the first step in your GDPR compliance process. This includes listing down the data in backups and the subsequent replicas that the testers have created for themselves. This step might expose uncomfortable surprises, like huge amounts of personal data in test database tables.

2. Develop a smooth test data management process

A lean and adaptable process is needed to stay in control for a smooth test data management process. Properly analysing and tracking the document from where the real data is coming, and where it is going is important. According to the new regulation, it is important to ensure that no personal data is open to business users, software testers, test managers, and other team members during software development, maintenance and test phases.

3. Employ a combination of masked data or synthetic data for testing

Though using synthetic data is a desirable option, but it is not always promising. Hence, it might be prudent to use a combination of carefully masked data along with synthetic data.

4. A proper review of privacy policies

Privacy policies must be articulated accurately. There should be a specific reason for collecting, sharing, storing, and using the personal data among third-party processors. Consequently, it is also important that you are reviewing the third party policies as well to make sure they comply too.

How can TestingXperts help?

Adherence to the regulation will require a comprehensive test data management approach. TestingXperts will help you build cross-functional teams for you to carry out various GDPR assessment and implementation activities with Tx’s GDPR framework. Tx has a step-by-step phased approach to GDPR compliance to provide a comprehensive solution.

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Cybersecurity and Data Protection have become the most talked about issues of recent times. Protecting internal and private data is a concern for every country and organization. Every country or region is coming up with its own Data Protection Act to protect their data from cyber-attacks and other probing vulnerabilities. Likewise, On April 14, 2016, the European Union parliament approved the General Data Protection Regulation, commonly known as GDPR. The law will be enforced from May 25, 2018. GDPR will be directly applicable in each EU Member State.

Contents 1. How Can your Organization Adapt to the GDPR Compliance? 2. Is your Organization’s GDPR Testing Strategy in Place? 3. Tx Security Testing Strategy

After May 2018, organizations processing personal data will be held more responsible for their data collection and its use. Though many organizations have implemented processes steady with GDPR, this new Regulation will affect most organizations on various levels. Failing to meet the terms with the GDPR can lead to a fine of up to 4% of the global turnover or €20,000,000, whichever is higher. Hence, companies have become more cautious to adapt to this changing data protection law and are hiring expensive consultants to secure their data by the deadline.

How Can your Organization Adapt to the GDPR Compliance?

Adherence to the regulation will require a comprehensive security approach, with assistance from legal and IT departments. Implementing security within the DNA of the organization is the best approach an organization should consider to overcome every desecration and incident. The overall system must be designed, keeping security as the ultimate goal. The data of the organization should be designed by considering security protocols and GDPR compliance process.

There should be a security team enabling the compliance process across the organization. Eventually, bringing in security aspects within the structural design of enterprises while they are being built will disentangle complex data protection and security issues. Employing a security testing team to manage the organization’s data and assure data protection according to the security standards should be the ultimate focus for the organizations.

Is your Organization’s GDPR Testing Strategy in Place?

According to a recent industry survey, only 33% of organizations are confident that every piece of customer data could be identified promptly across all systems and applications. 66% of organizations are not completely confident they could erase customer data “without delay,” as required by the right to be forgotten.

Now, how will the organizations become GDPR compliant? To abide by the new compliance regulation, it is important to abide by the comprehensive security testing methods. Bringing in security aspects within the planning stage of enterprises can solve complex security and data protection issues.

Tx Security Testing Strategy

TestingXperts (Tx), as an innovative and modern software testing company, is guiding organizations through their digital transformation process. With its broad set of software solutions, Tx is helping them to navigate through their compliance journeys successfully. Tx is providing organizations the assistance to help achieve their GDPR compliance and deploy the controls required by the regulation.

Having a robust security testing strategy and system in place enables organizations to act in accordance with any upcoming State or Federal guidelines. Tx, with its modern and innovative security testing framework ‘Tx-Secure’, has guided organizations and provided state-of-the-art security testing techniques to adhere to the changing guidelines.

Tx’s dedicated security testing professionals have developed methodologies, processes, templates, checklists, and guidelines for web applications, software products, networks, and cloud.

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